Nice writeup of "press forward" tracks in Trackmania from Robert Yang. I knew about the genre, but hadn't twigged that the key to its existence was that Trackmania's physics are deterministic. Which of course, makes sense, now I think of it.

"That's how weird games are -- we make things while barely even knowing what they are. Your goal is to be really good at thinking about your own game, and to do that, you have to put in the work of thinking. Remember that there are many ways of thinking about your game, and writing is just one mode." This is all very good, but this particularly.

"Once everyone got on-board with "anyone can make video games", then the weird leap in logic was, "who wouldn't want to make video games," and worse, "who wouldn't want to solely live off their video games?"" This is all lovely from Robert - especially noting that making art is not incompatible with, separately, working, and that creative endeavours do not have to be our sole life's work. (And: that doing things not full-time does not devalue them in the slightest!)

It turns out that all the Tale of Tales interviews I found problematic possibly came down to Michael; this interview, between Robert Yang and Auriea Harvey, is gentle, charming, and insightful. Not what I expected at all; really worth reading if you're interested in a different approach to game/level design.

"...if you're in a public-facing room of the house, then who owns the stuff in that room? (A lot of Gone Home pivots on this question, of who owns which spaces?) To help you figure that out, objects frequently overlap each other: something that belongs to one character might sit on top of a leaflet they picked up, which sits on top of a letter they received. It uses these spatial connections to emphasize the narrative connections between things and what they symbolize." Robert Yang, as expected, is shrewd and fascinating in his take on Gone Home. But I really liked this point: in many ways, it's a really interesting game to view from a material culture perspective - the way spaces are used, and personalised, and (in a home people have just moved into) what are the _first_ things they have unpacked? And so forth. It's a good game about actual, honest, *stuff*, and the way it represents us.